A new economy of work, on the blockchain

How The Bounties Network and Gitcoin are working towards a new way of working.

I’ve spend my whole — albeit short — life working for myself, either as a freelancer or contractor, or building startups, or more recently running a development agency. I got my first paying gig as a development contractor when I was just 12, by someone who was crazy enough to trust me to build a website for the event they were organising.

I’ve never really needed to search for work, but there have been times where work was slightly more scarce than I wanted it to be. In such periods it sucks to be a contractor, because your choices are more or less limited to cold calling or emailing potential customers, or waiting. There’s of course these contracting websites like Upwork or Fiverr, but those are crowded with people that are way more experienced in using those platforms, and margins are very small.

Gitcoin

Recently, however, I found an alternative: Gitcoin. Nope, it’s not another cryptocurrency, even though it sounds like that. Instead, it is a way for blockchain projects to outsource work to the community in the form of bounties, which are basically Github issues with some form of reward attached to them. Not only is that a great, low-barrier, way to make a quick…